Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Blogging is Strategic Marketing

Generally marketing is measured in terms of return on investment and for most people this means if they spend X dollars on marketing activities and they get Y incremental profit dollars, then Y/X = ROI. This approach usually results in marketing budgets being discretionary and when times get tough the budget gets cut, pretty early on in the cycle of trimming the P&L to meet forecasted quarterly results (usually because its impossible to prove Y – or its true incrementality).

However the intangible assets of a business make up a huge proportion of the market valuation of a business. This balance sheet goodwill is driven in part by activities that affect customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty. It also takes account of brand value, competitive conditions, market share, dynamics and awareness. These factors collectively are often referred to as strategic marketing.

The nature of blogging is to build genuine customer relationships, if taken to the core of a business strategy it can build substantial trust with customers. That in turn will create customer evangelists driving not only improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty statistics but generate a long term brand advantage in the market. Blogging has to be strategic.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks jb3 - its such a good subject you raise I am going to start a separate post on this.